The idea of minimal living, an international fad, has fallen on fertile soil in New Zealand, thanks to our national housing crisis and shifting ideas about the way we want to live. For some people, a tiny house is the only home they will ever afford to own. Others are stepping off the treadmill of modern life to ask: How much space does a person really need?

Magazine

Jul - Aug 2018

Our towns and cities are lacking something important, and I was reminded of this during a recent visit to Hong Kong.
There, senior citizens fill the social niche that teenagers do in Auckland. They loiter in the local square with their mates, laughing raucously. When they exercise in the park, their music precedes them, emanating from tiny boom-boxes clipped to their backpacks. Each morning, I woke to their voices chatting in the street, three stories below, over their first cigarette of the day.
This is a city New Zealanders like feeling superior to. “We don’t want to turn into Hong Kong,” we say, worried about intensified housing.
But Hong Kong has something we don’t. It has elderly people hanging out in public, everywhere you look. Its residential areas are packed with spaces for people to meet, gather, and linger—squares, plazas, tea-houses, corner stores, tiny parks, giant parks, streetside seats—while ours are not. And we suffer for it.
Ray Oldenburg, an American sociologist, first noticed these places in the 1970s. Or rather, he noticed that European cities had them, and American cities didn’t. He named them ‘third places’, because your first place is your home, and your second is your workplace, but your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances. These places are cheap or free. They’re open to people from all walks of life.
New Zealand has a great third place—the outdoors. My favourite third place is a DOC hut, any of them—the one space in the country where anyone is up for a yarn. But I can’t stop in at a DOC hut on my way home from work, and neither can the other 86 per cent of New Zealanders who live in urban centres. Reading Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, I began to wish for an urban equivalent.
“A community life can exist when one can go daily to a given location at a given time and see many of the people one knows,” writes another American sociologist, Philip Slater, author of a book on loneliness.
When a city has lovely spaces for people for people to stroll in, or loiter, or meet friends—and importantly for our senior citizens, when these places are close to home—then the requirement for one’s house to be large and nice enough for entertaining is lessened. And when you have places to meet your neighbours by chance, you can get to know them without the pressure of inviting them over. Oldenburg describes third places as neutral ground: no one has to play host and everyone is at ease.
“If there is no neutral ground in the neighbourhoods where people live, association outside the home will be impoverished,” he writes. “Many, perhaps most, neighbours will never meet, to say nothing of associate, for there is no place for them to do so.”
Why is all of this important? Because a third of us said we were lonely in the 2014 census, and one in five of us will seek treatment this year for depression or anxiety. And because our cities aren’t bolstering one of the most significant aspects of mental health: a sense of community.
Yet we blame this lack of community upon ourselves—we haven’t tried hard enough to build it—when the problem is in fact the lack of a venue for this to take place. It’s akin to wondering why no one plays pick-up basketball when there’s no court, hoop or ball.
As we rapidly expand our cities, as we solve our housing crises, we have the chance to correct this. We could shift away from the prioritisation of cars as a method of transport, and make our streets places for strolls and encounters. That means living a little closer together, placing useful things within walking distance, perhaps forgoing individual parcels of lawn for large, shared parks. When our third places are a drive away, elderly people are fastened in retirement villages, and teenagers stuck in suburbia.
We could treat the city as our living room, kitchen, dining room, back garden and sunny deck. We could value connection over privacy.
The tiny-house dwellers featured in this issue are bravely striking out for a new way of life—one where we value the spaces we share with others as much as the spaces we keep to ourselves.

At least 14 gas-rich galaxies have been discovered on the verge of merging, according to a study published in Nature—and the authors say this is the most massive structure in the Universe.
Called SPT2349-56, this cluster lies about 12.4 billion light-years away. Within each galaxy forming it, stars are growing 50 to 1000 times faster than they are in the Milky Way. But the cluster takes up a space only three times bigger than the Milky Way—a density which means all 14 galaxies will be forced to quickly merge into one ‘mega-galaxy’, says study author Scott Chapman.
Further data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in northern Chile shows these 14 galaxies are just the beginning—there are even more galaxies close by.

Plants are social beings. When leaves from different plants touch each other, their roots send out signals, telling the other plant to get lost. New research from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, published in PLOS One in May, found that maize seedlings whose leaves were touched give off chemicals via their roots, which cause non-touched maize seedlings to grow away from them.
Study co-author Velemir Ninkovic says the chemicals signal a crowded environment, so other plants choose environments with less competition and therefore more resources. Later on, seedlings exposed to these root chemicals also grow more leaves—a typical plant response to avoid being left in the shade.

If an ecosystem has been severely damaged, can it recover? Almost never, according to a new study—even when active restoration takes place. Researchers from Northern Illinois University looked at 400 studies of ecosystems worldwide that had been destroyed or damaged by logging, mining, oil spills, agriculture, or nutrient pollution. Human-driven restoration didn’t speed up their recovery, or restore biodiversity any better than simply leaving areas to recover on their own. The study’s authors say their research reinforces the need to conserve intact ecosystems, because disturbed ones take such a long time to recover, and never return to their previous state.

The ocean is our playground, storehouse, transport corridor, driver of weather and coastal change. We’ve learned the hard way that it’s possible for us to exhaust its resources and overwhelm its natural processes. Now, scientists are mapping the web of relationships between the sea, the land and human industry, to figure out how fishing, aquaculture, tourism, land development, and recreation affect its health. What should be permitted, and what prohibited—and where? How can we best strike a balance between using and protecting our seas?

One hundred years ago, an influenza pandemic tore across the world, infecting 500 million people, and killing between 50 and 100 million—between three and five per cent of the world’s population. But it wasn’t equally lethal everywhere it visited. In Tasmania, less than 0.1 per cent of the population succumbed, while Western Samoa saw a mortality rate of 22 per cent.
Why the disparity? A study by New Zealand and Australian researchers, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases in May, suggests that prior exposure to a non-lethal flu virus, social isolation, and ethnic immune systems are some of the factors.
Māori were 10 times as likely as pākehā to die from the flu. Study co-author Nick Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Otago, says this was likely due to higher rates of poverty and thus more crowded living conditions. Because a greater proportion of Māori lived rurally, earlier waves of the virus, which arrived before November 1918, might not have reached them to give them increased immunity. Mysteriously, Māori men and women were affected equally. (In all other populations, more men died from the flu than women.)
Wilson says Samoa was also unusual in that the flu spread fastest through the highest social class. “This was because in Samoan culture, when a chief was sick, a lot of people would gather round him to transfer oral knowledge to the next generation—customs such as this would have increased spread.”
He says this level of global mortality from a virus is unlikely to ever happen again. “The world is so interconnected that almost everyone gets exposed to most flu viruses within a few years, as opposed to in the sailing and steamship days when populations could go decades without seeing a particular virus.”
The main cause of death during the 1918 pandemic wasn’t the flu itself, but the bacterial pneumonia that followed it. These days, it could be treated with antibiotics.

A one-centimetre-long shrimp can’t create an ocean current when it swims, but en masse, these tiny creatures could be contributing to ocean mixing.
A Stanford University study published in Nature watched brine shrimp, Artemia salina, as they swam in a tank. When they swim upwards, as a band just 50 centimetres deep, their wake mixes the water 1000 times more than it would mix naturally.
Ocean krill are five times the length of brine shrimp, and twice a day they vertically swim hundreds of metres as a group in a band tens of metres deep—which the authors say means the krills’ downward jets could have a collective effect on ocean mixing.

An old tool that has been used for decades to determine which chemicals are in foods, the human body and pharmaceuticals could now be used to see if a mosquito is carrying the Zika virus.
The microcephaly-causing virus has spread by mosquito into many new countries in recent years, including Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. A major challenge in monitoring the situation has been the lack of fast, affordable tests.
Currently, genetic material is analysed for the virus using the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). But a study published in Science Advances has found that near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) predicts Zika with between 94.2 and 99.3 per cent accuracy. NIRS simply involves shining a light at the head and thorax of the mosquito to read the chemical compounds within. It’s 18 times faster and 116 times cheaper than RT-qPCR, with no need for dissections or reagents.

If we’re serious about Predator Free 2050—about ridding New Zealand of every last rat, stoat and possum—then Fiordland poses its sternest backcountry test. If we can pull it off here, we can pull it off in any of our national parks. What makes this land so difficult—and so important?

Climate change will affect the nutritional composition of rice for the worse, according to a study which grew rice plants under different carbon dioxide levels. The research, published in Science Advances in May, found that simulating atmospheric carbon dioxide levels predicted at the end of the century (570 parts per million, compared with the current 410) resulted in a grain with lower levels of protein, iron and zinc, as well as lower levels of the vitamins B1, B2, B5 and B9. More than two billion people depend on rice as their primary food source.

The oldest ‘true’ baleen whale fossil ever found, at more than 27.5 million years old, was excavated about 30 years ago from a dairy farm at Hakataramea in South Canterbury. In April, it was finally named: Toipahautea waitaki, which translates to ‘baleen origin whale of the Waitaki region’. The University of Otago’s Māori Affairs department and Ngāi Tāhu were consulted for help with the name.
Many New Zealand species’ Linnaean names carry te reo in part or in full. However, University of Waikato associate professor Hēmi Whaanga says while it’s important te reo is used, care must be taken because naming is often done without consultation with local iwi.
“It’s a respect thing—we need to consider the names we plan to use might be sacred, refer to history, genealogy, places, events. Using them in another context can confuse people on the true meaning, or it may be culturally inappropriate to use that name.”
Name blunders of the past include the hybrid te reo-Latin Taniwhasaurus oweni, a mosasaur named in 1874. Using te reo in Linnaean naming still desperately needs protocol, says Whaanga: “Once it’s named, you can’t change it.”

In August 1849, Sarah and Isaac Cripps and their three children boarded the Fancy, bound for Auckland Island, 465 kilometres south of New Zealand. They were part of a group of 66 prospective colonists planning to start a new settlement in the subantarctic. As they put to sea, they imagined the sunny weather and gentle pastures that awaited them. They would not find out until December that they’d all been tricked.

It’s the Middle Ages. Genghis Khan presides over the largest contiguous empire the world has ever seen. Mansa Musa gives away enough gold on his trip to Mecca to cause an economic crisis in the Near East. Dante writes The Divine Comedy. The English and French kick off the Hundred Years’ War.
And Polynesian explorers sail to all corners of the Pacific. At least one waka lands on Enderby Island, at Sandy Bay, and stays there. The explorers live on sea lions, seals, albatrosses, petrels, fish and mussels. They cook in hangi, stoking fires with rātā, and their dogs gnaw the bones.
Archaeologist Atholl Anderson investigated these earth ovens in 2003, dating their remnants to either the 13th or 14th century—about the same time that New Zealand was settled. Traces remain of visits to the subantarctic Snares Islands, as well as settlements in the Kermadecs, far to the north of mainland New Zealand, and the Chatham Islands to the east.
On Enderby, part of the Auckland Islands group, Polynesians stayed for at least one summer, perhaps more, then departed, leaving behind tools, fish hooks, scrapers and bones—including this fish hook, which was recovered from Sandy Bay and is now held at the Southland Museum.
After they left, the Auckland Islands remained uninhabited for at least 400 years. There are no signs of human presence between these remains and the islands’ rediscovery by Abraham Bristow in 1806.
While the earlier explorers may have paid only a summer’s visit, Enderby Island marks the southernmost Polynesian colony yet to have been identified.